Lesson 4: Five Things You Need to Know to Grow Any Business

Video transcript

Hey, there. Ezra Firestone here from SmartMarketer.com, for Shopify's
Ecommerce University, and we are talking about the Fantastic Five. Now,
these are the five things that you need to know to grow any business. It
does not matter if you have a physical product business, a services
business, if you're selling downloadable goods. It doesn't matter what
you're selling on your Shopify store, these are the things that you need in
order to be successful.

You need visibility. You need people who are interested in your products
and services to know that you exist. And that's like search engine
optimization, and paid advertising, and Facebook, and content marketing,
and kind of all the stuff we just covered in this course. And there's a
whole bunch of other ways of generating visibility, like offline,
traditional press and interviews, and joint ventures, and things like that.
So you need visibility.

Now, once people know that you exist, once that they have engaged with you
and they've found out about you, you need them to actually take you up on
the offers that you're making, and that's called conversion. So, like, for
every hundred people who visit your website, how many people buy something?
For every hundred people who see your offer, how many take you up on it?

And something that goes right along with conversion is your average order
value. So if you get 100 people to your website, and let's say you get 50
orders, right, if each order is worth $30, well, you make X amount of
money. In that case, you make $1,500. So if you got 50 people, and each
order is worth $30, you're making 1,500 bucks. Now, what if each order was
for $40? Well, then you'd be making $2,000. So if you can increase the size
of your order, you can also grow your business.

So if you can increase your visibility and get more people to know about
you, you can grow your business. If you can increase your conversion rate
and get more people to say yes to your offer, you can grow your business.
If you can increase your order value, the transaction size, then you can
get people to grow your business. Sorry, then you can grow your business.

And the next way is frequency. So the amount of times someone does business
with you. And that's repeat business. That's this whole process that we've
just gone through. That's what it's all been about. I mean, it's one of the
main benefits of this process, that you generate a whole ton of repeat
business. So frequency is the fourth thing that you need. That any business
needs to grow.

And then the fifth way that you can grow your business is by increasing
your margins. So, you know, buying products in bulk, or whatever it is.

So again, that is... these are the five ways that you can grow any
business. You can get more visibility, you can get a higher conversion
rate, you can have a higher average transaction size, you can increase the
frequency with which people do business with you, and you can increase your
margin so you can get a better, you know, kind of better prices on the
things that you're selling. And that, those are the ways that you have to
grow your business. And it's important to understand those, as a business
owner. Understand that if you want to grow your business, you've got to put
your attention on one of those five areas.

Now, for visibility, that's, like, content marketing, and product listing
ads, and comparison shopping engines, and Google AdWords, and Facebook ads,
and retargeting, and YouTube, and Pinterest, and organic traffic. So those
are some of the ways that you can generate visibility for your store. And
we've covered a lot of those in this course, but it's important that if
you, like, are looking, "Hey, I want to generate more visibility for my
ecommerce business," these are some of the areas you can start focusing on.

Now, you will be able to drive traffic, okay? It is easy to do. It's not
very difficult. And if you follow my Facebook advertising process, you'll
be able to drive a whole lot of traffic and generate a whole lot of sales.
But don't worry about the visibility part, because you will be able to do
that.

Now, the next is conversion, and that's, like, using videos on your product
pages, and having really great sales copy and unique selling propositions,
and understanding of landing page psychology, and making sure that your
products are relevant to the people who are coming to visit them. Doing AB
testing, and geographic and demographical and day parting testing, and
doing segmentation, and having consistency of content. Like, that's all,
those are all conversion elements, right? So that's giving you some of the
ideas of things that you want to pay attention to from a conversion
standpoint. Because one little thing in each one of these segments, one
little visibility strategy and one little conversion strategy, can have a
significant boost in your business.

Order value. So that's up-sells and cross-sells, and your sales funnel, and
bundles, and kits. So those are some of the ways that you can increase your
order value. If you're selling Halloween costumes, you probably want to
offer wigs along with them as a cross-sell to increase your order value. So
you definitely want to have a cross-sell on your website.

Frequency. The way that we increase our frequency is by doing sales
promotions, and often by doing content marketing and building a
relationship with our customers, and making them related offers. So we
definitely want to increase the frequency of our orders, and these are some
of the ways you can do that.

And then lastly, your margins, right? So how much are you getting the
products for. You can buy in bulk to lower your margins. You can lower your
merchant fees. You can probably call up your merchant processor today, or
call up PayPal today, and get your fees lowered really easily, without...
just because you've been a merchant for a while. So merchant fees are a
great way to increase your margins. Outsourcing, and getting some of the
stuff off your plate so that it's a little bit cheaper, instead of you
doing it, you know, you can leverage your time. Your time is more valuable
than doing a mundane task, so you can outsource, or you can hire
outsources. If you're hiring someone that's a little bit too expensive or
something like that, you can get it outsourced for cheaper, usually.

And then volume. The more volume you do, the better your margins tend to
get.

So Ezra Firestone here from SmartMarketer.com for Shopify's Ecommerce
University. Just wanted to give you a couple things to think about with
regard to growing your business. Because that's really what this is all
about. You know, we all run ecommerce businesses here, or some kind of
commerce business, if we're using Shopify. And we're interested in growing
that business because we want to support our family, and we want to support
our friends, and we want to have freedom of time and location and money,
and we're looking for all of those things. And Shopify is giving us the
opportunity to have that through their platform and through this
university, and it's very, very cool of them. So Shopify, thank you so
much. And thank you so much, listener, for going through this video series.
I hope you've gotten something out of it. And I really enjoyed sharing this
stuff with you, and I look forward to connecting with you soon. Thanks.
Bye.